I Sat There Smugly Laughing at How Clever I Was When I Wrote the Intro For this Book

So my friend and sometimes collaborator Anne Elizabeth Moore asked me to write the forward to her next edition of The Manifesti of Radical Literature (MRL), which is going into its next printing. She will be celebrating its release at Quimby's Bookstore here in Chicago on Fri, Nov 12th at 7pm with Illegal Signs organizer Rami Tabello, to talk about a variety of (critiques/analysis of) culture jammingy topics. So here's some info about the event, Rami Tabello, Anne's work, and then I'll paste in my introduction I wrote for the book.

Canada’s Illegal Ad Vigilante Rami Tabello with Anne Elizabeth Moore

at Quimby’s on Fri, Nov 12th, 7pm

“We fight illegal advertising using the rule of law,” Rami Tabello says when asked to describe the Toronto organization he founded to fight criminal billboards, Illegal Signs. It’s funded through donations and Tabello’s gambling take—a crazy support system for a group that spends a lot of time scrutinizing city bylaws and calling in complaints to the proper authorities. Tabello’s been called both “a fearless advocate for public space” and “annoying” by Toronto city residents and elected officials. He’ll present his work fighting—and beating—corporate criminals at Quimby’s in Chicago, a city with a massive illegal advertising problem of its own.

Rami Tabello is presented by Chicago author Anne Elizabeth Moore on the occasion of the re-release of the underground hit The Manifesti of Radical Literature (MRL). Out of print for over a year, MRL is an anarchist style guide for cultural producers, with chapters on such foundational political acts as throwing away one’s dictionary, creating one’s own system of punctuation, and refusing to abide by the language imposed upon us by corporate entities. Also, it is funny and of a pleasing form and light heft, perfect for spiriting away in one’s back pocket for an evening of street stenciling or shopdropping. The expanded second edition, features a new Introduction and Afterword  and improved jokes. Moore’s Unmarketable received favorable reviews in Forbes, the LA Times, Advertising Age, and the Guardian, and was called “an anti-corporate manifesto with a difference” by Mother Jones and “sharp and valuable muckraking” by Time Out New York.

Come hear about the work of Illegal Signs, pick up a copy of MRL, and meet Tabello and Moore at 7 p.m. on Friday, November 12. Quimby's Bookstore is at 1854 W. North Ave, Chicago, 773-342-0910.

For more info:

Rami Tabello

Pressing Concern

Previous edition of Manifesti

My Introduction For Anne Elizabeth Moore’s

The Manifesti of Radical Literature, 2^nd edition

The bookstore I manage in Chicago is a well-known purveyor of radical reading material, a store known by many to be the finest of its sort in many counties. I have come to recommend a variety of texts for exploration into contemporary anarchistic thinking. The first on the list is consistently The Manifesti of Radical Literature, which serves as an illuminating primer for critical examination of institutions such as the media. But the book is also a call to arms. Besides my many years of experience in disseminating radical literature, I am also a longtime writer, editor, and publisher of the format of "underground newspaper" or "small print run periodical" that one would call a zine (that which one pronounces to rhyme with spleen). In my account of independent media publishing and selling at this Chicago-based bookstore entitled UnParkable: Zines, Books, and Comics In Chicago's Wicker Park (My Kitchen Table, 2008), I provide an in-depth analysis of revolutionary bookstore culture. As the foremost expert in the field of subversive publishing and distribution, I can declare that there is no better tract of insurrectionary scripture to instruct revolutionary change as The Manifesti of Radical Literature. Shelved in the section labeled Books By People Who Publish Zines and Then Also Some Other Types of Books About How Screwed Up the World Is, it often sells better than its shelf mates Got Any Gum? and Move Over a Little You're Hogging the Whole Damn Seat. The Manifesti of Radical Literature continues into its next edition, still as relevant as ever, after all these three years, offering strategies for liberating oneself from a worldview defined by corporate, governmental and mainstream media, aging better into the twenty-first century than other political criticism such as texts like Howard Zinn's A People's History of My Foot Smelling or Christopher Hitchens' I'm a Charming British Guy1. Moore's text exemplifies this genre of firebrand literature necessary to inspire progressive thinking. It continues to facilitate cultural enlightenment, doing so outside the perimeters of the masculine majority, coincidentally with an empowering feminist voice. There is no doubt that The Manifesti of Radical Literature will continue to inspire direct action with wit and wisdom. And footnotes.2

Liz Mason, 2010

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1 Or Noam Chomsky’s You Gotta Fight For Your Right to Political Party or Edward Said’s controversial journalism on the political imperialism, exile, and identity of Palatine, Illinois.

2 Like this one.